“You can look at any of Pete’s records, but don’t touch any of Will’s newspaper clippings about Bobby Kennedy or he’ll get awful sore.”
Will positively loves Bobby Kennedy, one of the men running for president, and reads anything he can find about him—books, newspapers, magazines. He’s got campaign posters on the wall, with pictures of the senator in a suit and tie waving, and he even has a blue-and-white campaign pin on his bookshelf. ALL THE WAY WITH RFK it reads. Dad likes Bobby Kennedy about as much as he likes Bob Dylan. He says he’s a runt whose family is ruining the country. Dad wants Nixon to win the election.
A breath of wind comes through the window, and a few stray drops of rain pitter-patter the windowsill.
“Well, I’ll let you get unpacked, but be downstairs for dinner in a few. Ma will want to see you. Dad, too, I guess.” I try to think if there’s anything else. “Don’t take too long. Remember there’s cobbler.”
I close the door and start back down the twisting stairs. As I go, a sound from inside the room comes to me. Could be it’s a cough from all that road dust. Or maybe it’s the sound you make when you’ve been trying real hard to hold back crying and all at once you can’t hold it any longer and it just comes out.
I think back to Ma’s saying, and I wonder what reason God could possibly have for sending Frankie our way now.
Maybe it’s to help me save Pete’s life.
Chapter 2
MA
“Why is Frankie’s city burning up?” I ask Ma as we set the picnic table on our porch for dinner.
“Because some people lit fires,” Ma says. “And fires burn.” She brushes away a daddy longlegs spider and sets down a pitcher of iced tea. “Knives face the other way, John Thomas.”
Only Ma calls me by my full name, John Thomas. I hate it.
I go around the table switching the knives while the storm purrs to itself, like a giant cat. It’s hiding behind the pines on the other side of our hill, waiting.
“How does lighting fires do anybody any good?”
I can smell the storm’s electricity in the air, can feel it along my arms and the back of my neck. Out in our yard, the trees look silvery, their thirsty leaves curling skyward. Ma stands and watches the world surrender to the green dark. When she puts her hands on her hips, I know one thing for sure: Ma will never surrender.
“When a person feels trampled under, sooner or later, something bad happens.” Ma turns and her eyes find mine, and it seems my shoes are nailed to the floorboards then. “If you go long enough thinking you don’t have a say in your life, you reach a point where you’ll do anything to show others that you do. And when that time comes, you don’t care what it is. If it’s lighting fires, you light fires.”
Behind her, the trees are swaying. A warm breeze is blowing, growing stronger. Her dark hair moves in it as her green eyes steal some of the storm’s strength for herself. I don’t feel funny saying that my mother is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
“Don’t you go askin’ Francis about this,” she warns.
“No ma’am.”
“And don’t go baiting him, hoping he’ll bring it up on his own.”
I say, “No ma’am” again and sigh.
“Finish setting the table and go wash up,” Ma says. “We’ll eat soon.”
I’m just about through the screen door when Ma stops me again, this time with her voice. It’s sharp, like one of those knives.
“John Thomas.”
I turn around. “Yes ma’am?” Her skirt whips around her knees and she’s still got her hands on her hips.
“Don’t you ever do anything to make somebody feel like their life is no account to you, hear?”
“Yes ma’am . . .”
“It’s the worst thing you can do to a person.”
“Worse than killing them?”
“It’s a kind of killing,” Ma says. “A killing of the soul. Don’t you do it.”
“I won’t.”
I leave her on the porch and go inside to wash up. I’m still thinking about the fires by the time I finish. All my life I’ve been told there’s nothing more dangerous than fire, nothing.
You learn that when your home is surrounded by trees for miles and miles.
Mr. Kemper comes just before the storm. From our bedroom window, Pete spies his black sedan slithering up our hill.
“It’s the worm,” he says.
Will beats me to the window, wedging his way in beside Pete, and I have to peek over their shaggy heads to see down into the drive. Dad is already there, but Mr. Kemper honks his horn anyway. Dad tosses his work gloves in the wheelbarrow and walks over to the driver’s side of the fancy car.
They talk a while, Mr. Kemper in the car, Dad standing outside it. Dad doesn’t invite him up to the porch, and Kemper doesn’t ask.
Kemper works for the county. He’s scarecrow-skinny, with an Adam’s apple like a tangerine and a voice that sounds like a windshield wiper dragging over dry glass. We can’t hear what he says from our window. No need.
He’s come to try to get Dad to sell our house and land. The county wants it so they can build their dam and flood the valley. Lot of the other families in the valley have sold already. Ours and just a few others are holding out.
“He’s persistent,” Pete says.
“Didn’t think we’d see him again after last time,” says Will. “Notice he ain’t got out of his car?”
“And he ain’t turned off his engine neither,” Pete agrees.
The last time Mr. Kemper came, he got out of his car and announced to Dad that he was going to stay as long as it took until Dad agreed to sign over our home. Dad answered with a quick, low whistle. Kemper got to his car just in time, but old Butch got a piece of his pant leg.
I’m aware of a quiet presence at my side: Frankie’s joined us at the window. He watches the meeting below in his silent, dark way.
“Tell him off, Dad,” Will mutters.
In the drive below, Dad lights a cigar. A tiny orange flower blossoms in his hands as wispy clouds of blue smoke rise into the still air. From behind the pines, the storm growls again.
Soon. Very soon now.
Kemper is leaning out of his window, stabbing at the earth with one bony finger. His head bobbles at the end of his long neck.
“He really does look like a worm, don’t he?” I ask.
Dad’s shoulders bounce beneath his overalls: he’s laughing at something Kemper said. Then he turns away, waving Kemper off as he walks for our porch.
Kemper thumps the dash and shakes his head. The rain has started by the time he backs his big, shiny automobile carefully down our dirt drive. Pete and Will move for the bedroom door, but I stay, stay and watch those yellow headlights through the trees and the rain until I’m sure the man who works for the county is across the Hopkins Bridge at the bottom of our hill. If it collapsed while he was on it, I wouldn’t complain.
I’m surprised to find Frankie is still beside me when I turn from the window.
“Come on, Frankie,” I say then. “Dinnertime.”
As we start down the stairs I add, “Don’t worry none about the worm. He won’t bother us no more.”
I don’t really believe that, and I get the idea Frankie knows it.
Chapter 3
STAIRWAYS
The storm breaks at dinner, slapping Stairways with fat raindrops and pitching pieces of jagged lightning across black sky. We eat on the porch, listening to it howl out all the fury it’s gathered up from the long, hot day. Soon, water pours down the eaves in a shimmering curtain that wraps around us and gurgles in thin streams between tree roots in the front yard on its way down to make muddy lakes in the lane.
When he finishes dinner, Dad slides his plate to one side and strikes a match. The scent of another Primo del Rey cigar mingles with the perfume of soaked earth and wet tree bark. He leans back in his chair and folds his hands on the table, holding the cigar between his teeth.